Computational Law Research and Development at MIT

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Computational Law Research and Development

This open public research and development site explores the emerging field of computational law and legal informatics as social science, technical capability and business innovation. This site is curated by MIT Media Lab's Dazza Greenwood as part ofProf. Alex "Sandy" Pentland's MIT Human Dynamics Lab work on Social Physics and Connection Science, with emphasis on the legal and policy dimensions of big data and personal data markets and ecologies.

Learn. Build. Discuss.

On March 16-18, 2018, the first annual Computational Law & Blockchain Festival will bring together coders, designers, lawyers, policymakers, researchers, and students from around the world to co-create the future of law, legal practice, and policymaking. This global initiative will be a push to create and implement computational law (e.g., programmable contracts) and legal blockchain use cases. We will achieve this through a combination of educational sessions, hackathons, and policy discussions. In the spirit of decentralization, this entire event is hosted by independent, self-organized nodes around the world. Join us so you can LEARN, BUILD, and DISCUSS:

LEARN: New to computational law or blockchain technologies? Learn the basics from local and global experts at our educational sessions.

BUILD: Are you a coder or designer? Come test your hacking skills on one of our global challenges. Opportunities for local and global awards for winners!

DISCUSS: What’s the appropriate role of government in the blockchain ecosystem? Are ICOs securities offerings? What are the benefits and drawbacks of computational law for the legal system and society? How can we promote a welcoming and diverse blockchain community? Let’s discuss!

The Festival welcomes enthusiasts of all ages, genders, backgrounds, skill levels, and disciplines, and will be free to attend and participate. The Boston Node will be located at Cambidge Innovation Center and loosely track to the Internation Schedule for this event. Registered participants will receive the specific location, schedule and activity meeting details at our node.

2017 MIT Legal Forum on AI and Blockchain

October 30 & 31, 2017 at the MIT Media Lab

The inaugural MIT Legal Forum on AI & Blockchain mission is to provide a forum for legal scholars, practitioners, technologists and business professionals to (A) discuss the current and likely future impact of AI and blockchain technologies on the law, and (B) develop an initial framework for the evaluation, prioritization and practical application of AI and blockchain technologies to the law. For more information, see: MIT.edu/Law and Law.MIT.edu/MITLegalForum

2017 Open Access Journal Special Issue: Computation, Law and the Net

Join me and my fellow guest editors of this special issue in co-creating this historic volume. Together with the rise of computational power and the data deluge, the growth of the Internet ecosystem is the driver of a deep change in our lives. We are witnessing a development that not only is reshaping economies, societies and institutions worldwide, but is also impacting the way in which science is done.

According to a growing and heterogeneous literature, the computational social science paradigm is drastically increasing our understanding of social dynamics and our ability to manage social complexity. Seen in this perspective, computational social science (CSS) represents a topic of great interest for the legal world. The law itself is at the same time a social phenomenon and an ordering factor of social life. CSS, on the one hand, promises to shed a new light on socio-legal dynamics, on the other, it is gradually providing innovative tools capable to support public institutions in a series of legally relevant activities spanning from policy design to rule making, from regulatory impact analysis to law enforcement. The use of online experiments, sentiment analysis techniques or agent-based social simulations in the legal world are just a few examples of an uncharted scientific and applicative landscape that is worth being explored.

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 550 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

The goal for this hack night is to develop a bullet list of potentially important requirements, constraints and other design goals for migration from paper to digital Warehouse Receipts, derived from a rapid but focused walk through of relevant legal rules. The intention is to derive that bullet list from legal rules governing warehouse receipts in the form of electronic transferable records in the practical context of some likely types of rules governing parties using the digital warehouse receipt system derived from very standard trading partner and other commercial umbrella agreements. While these two sources are far from comprehensive sets of all the legal rules impacting a system for digital warehouse receipts, they do provide a core "DNA-like" set of coherent, widely accepted, authoritative, definite, timely, relevant and achievable foundation to build upon.

What is Computable Law?

Blockchain Legal Intensive

Research Spotlight: Temporal Public Data Exploration of US Code

Use the below interactive public data visualization tool to compare the rate of change in each title of the US Code. This visualization tool is being shared now as an example of how law can be presented as data in a way that enables any person to do basic data exploration. Note however, the underlying data is still in the process of being cleaned and not yet reliable as an accurate measure.

Ongoing Research: Uniform Law Adoption Analytics

There are many facets of the law to which data science and computational legal science methods can be applies and many aspects of such science that can be applied to any given facet of the law. One of the promising entry points being pursued by the Legal Science research team here at the MIT Media Lab is with an important body of statutes known as "Uniform Law". The #LegalScience research team is now commencing a research study to explore the data and systems comprising uniform laws of the states and territories of the United States.